COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN FOR Co-op: A GROUP DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

Abstract

Decision Support Systems which have been typical single user systems for most of the decade of their existence, are now evolving into tools for supporting groups of decision makers. Thus, they are merging into the mainstream of office information systems. Communication among multiple decision makers has been identified as the major novel issue in such group decision support systems (GDSS) . This paper analyzes the communications requirements of GDSS and presents a design architecture which is integrated in the presentation and application layers of the ISO Open Systems Architecture. This design has been implemented on a network of personal computers in Co-oP, a GDSS for cooperative group decision making based on interactive multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods.